In a series of recent high-profile articles, a group of contemporary scholars argue that the criminal law is a grand machine for the administration of suffering. The machine requires calibration, of course. The main standard we use for ours is objective proportionality. We generally punish more serious crimes more severely and aim to inflict the same punishment on similarly situated offenders who commit similar crimes. In the views of these authors, this focus on objective proportionality makes ours a rather crude machine. In particular, it ignores the fact that 1) different offenders may suffer to a different degree when subjected to the same punishment; 2) different offenders may have different happiness baselines, which may lead to disparities in absolute, subjective, and comparative happiness-to-suffering ratios among offenders subject to the same punishment; and 3) offenders’ self-reported states of happiness and suffering vary over the course of a sentence, revealing inaccuracies in our objective assessments of severity.

These scholars contend that a more sophisticated and rational approach would be to calibrate punishment according to the amount of suffering produced, trading objective proportionality for proportionality in subjective suffering. Looking forward to a day when advances in neuroscience and psychology will provide us with reliable qualitative and quantitative metrics of suffering, these defenders of punishment-as-suffering (“PAS”) are setting the stage now, arguing that no matter our theory of criminal law and punishment — be we retributivists or utilitarians — we are obliged to dial the machine according to who is in its thrall and to titer both the form and extent of punishment so as to achieve just the right kind and amount of suffering.

This view of the criminal law may strike some readers as troubling. It should. The problem with PAS can be traced to a crucial equivocation between “punishment,” which is a fundamentally normative concept, and “suffering,” which is one of punishment’s contingent effects, and a derivative failure to distinguish between the justification of punishment and the mechanics of penal practice. Once the elided distinction between punishment and suffering is reconstituted, it is clear that PAS has no bite on traditional theories of punishment, which define punishment objectively. To the contrary, most punishment theorists ought to reject outright the claim that punishment should be calibrated according to the subjective suffering it inflicts. That conclusion is bolstered by the uncomfortable outcomes PAS scholars deploy against objective theories of punishment as purported ad absurdum. While admittedly absurd, those results derive not from premises indigenous to traditional theories but from PAS’s distinctive claim that punishment is suffering.